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Introduction

It is usually thought that the origin of board games goes back thousands of years to the time of primitive people, who invented such games to help them interpret the wishes of the gods. Primitive people also may have amused themselves by scratching a pattern into the sand, placing stones on it, and moving the stones around in a way that imitated the hunting and combat that were parts of their everyday lives.

The board games played in today’s world are games of skill and chance that are played by two or more people who move pieces around on a specially marked board. Among the most popular board games are backgammon, chess, and checkers, which have survived for centuries.

Monopoly® and Scrabble® are popular board games of more recent origin. Some of the hundreds of kinds of board games are based on racing, hunting, or war. Many of the games involve skills of diplomacy and negotiation.

All board games have a board and playing pieces, though they may use dice and other accessories as well. Board games differ from tile games, such as dominoes or Mah-Jongg. Cribbage and other games that involve playing cards are not considered board games, even though a board may be used to keep score.

The oldest board games are known to be backgammon, checkers, and chess. People probably first played these games on the ground, using stones, bones, or shells as pieces. The earliest versions of these games were most likely to imitate the everyday activities of the players, many of whom were hunters, warriors, merchants, or gamblers.

This article describes the board games of backgammon, checkers, Monopoly®, and Scrabble®. A discussion of the board game of chess is provided in a separate article.

Backgammon

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Backgammon, a lively blend of skill and luck, is an ancient dice game played on a board by two people. It closely resembles another game called Parcheesi. No one knows exactly when the game was first played, but archaeologists have discovered a 5,000-year-old backgammon board at the site of the ancient Sumerian town of Ur in present-day Iraq. The Egyptian pharaohs played a form of backgammon, and boards from about 1500 bc have been found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and people of the Indian subcontinent played other versions of the game.

Backgammon in a form called Tabula was played in medieval Europe. It was called Tables in England, where the Anglos and Saxons enjoyed the game. The French and Germans called it Tric-Trac. Backgammon spread to the United States in the 17th century.

The backgammon board is split into four sections called tables, each with six narrow wedges, known as points, of two alternating colors. Each player has an outer table and an inner table, with the latter called home. The division between the inner and outer tables is called the bar. Both players have 15 pieces each that are known as men, or checkers, usually one set white and the other set black or red. Each player also has a pair of dice and a cup in which the dice are shaken before thrown.

The game is a race to move all of the 15 men around the board and then off the board. The players throw the dice to determine who starts first, and they then take turns throwing their dice. They move their men from point to point by the number shown on the dice. One man may be moved by the number of points on one of the dice, and a second man by the number on the other, or one man may be moved by the total on both dice. If a player throws doubles, the number of points that the men may be moved is doubled, or four men may be moved on a doubles throw if the player wishes to do so.

Four main factors make backgammon more than a game of pure chance. These are blocks, blots, reentry from the bar, and bearing off. A blocked point is a point occupied by two or more of the other player’s men. A man cannot stop on a blocked point, but it may move past that point to a vacant point if the number on one of the dice carries it that far.

A blot is a point occupied by one opposing man. When an opponent lands on a blot, either settling there or moving on by the number shown on the second die, the blot has been hit. The man that is hit on the blot must be placed on the bar, from where it reenters the game at the player’s inner table and begins moving around the board once again. Until the hit man reenters from the bar, the player can make no other moves.

A man reenters from the bar by a throw of the dice that allows it to land on an open point or on a blot in the opponent’s inner table. A man is reentered as though being played onto the board.

Each player begins the game with five men in his or her inner table. A player’s first objective is to get the remainder of the men there. After that has been accomplished, the men may be moved off the board, which is the process of bearing off. For every number shown on each of the dice, a man is removed from the corresponding point of the inner table, or from the highest occupied point lower than the number that is shown on each die. The first player to bear off all the men wins the game.

If one player bears off all the men before the other bears off any, the victory is called a gammon, and it counts as two wins. If the loser has no men off the board and has a man stranded on the bar or in the winner’s inner table, the game ends with a backgammon, which counts as three wins.

Variations of backgammon are played in the Far East, Africa, and elsewhere. They include Russian and Persian backgammon; the Turkish games of moultezin and gioul; the Greek games of plakoto and eurika; and acey-deucey, a game played in the United States Navy. International backgammon tournaments began in 1964.

Checkers

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Checkers is another board game of ancient origin. Each of the two players tries to capture or immobilize the other’s pieces. People throughout the world play variations of checkers, which is called draughts in Great Britain. Checkers is a war game with offensive and defensive play. Its basic principles are easy, but it can be very intricate. Checkers and chess have similar roots, but checkers is simpler and probably developed earlier. The game was played in Egypt during the time of the pharaohs, and it appears in the ancient Greek writings of Homer and Plato.

Checkers as played in the United States and Britain is the most widely played modern version. In this version each player starts with 12 pieces called men, or checkers. A conventional checkers board consists of 64 two-inch squares in eight rows of eight squares each. The squares are colored alternately light and dark; play is confined to one of these colors, usually the darker. One set of the flat, round men is called “white” and the other “black,” regardless of their actual colors, usually red and black.

The player with the black checkers makes the first move. All men are moved forward diagonally one square at a time, to the right or left, onto vacant squares. A player captures an opponent’s man by jumping over that man and landing on a vacant square just beyond. Two, three, or even more captures can be made during one move. If a man reaches the last row on the opposite side, it becomes a king and is crowned by placing another man of the same color on top of it. A king can move only one vacant square at a time, but it can go either forward or backward, which gives it a great advantage. When making more than one capture during a move, a king can go both forward and backward.

A player wins by capturing all of the opposing men or blocking them from moving. If neither player can win, the game ends in a draw. The players exchange colors after each game.

Checkers has many variations, including Spanish checkers, or pool checkers, in which an uncrowned man can jump backward or forward. A king can move any number of squares along a diagonal line, jumping pieces in its path. In Turkish checkers, each player uses 16 checkers and can move them straight ahead or to either side, but not backward. Another version, which is called losing checkers, has the objective of being the first to have all of one’s own men captured or immobilized. Still other variations include diagonal checkers; reversi; Italian checkers; Russian checkers; Polish, or Continental, checkers; and Montreal, or Quebec, checkers.

The first international team checkers matches took place in 1905. Today players compete in world, North American, and United States tournaments, each with its individual championship.

Monopoly®

Monopoly® is a game of real estate in which the players buy, sell, and trade property and try to accumulate wealth. Each tries to drive the others into bankruptcy. The players throw dice to determine their moves on the board. But Monopoly® is not just a game of chance, for a good Monopoly® player has skill, cunning, and a forceful style.

From two to eight persons may play Monopoly®. Each chooses a playing piece to move around the board, which is divided into spaces representing streets and various individual properties. Every player receives $1,500 in play money at the beginning of the game, and all remaining money is placed in the bank. One player acts as banker. The banker distributes the money, title deeds for property, and houses and hotels as the players buy or otherwise obtain them. The players throw the dice in turn and move clockwise around the board, starting from the space marked GO. Throwing doubles gives a player a second turn, but throwing three consecutive doubles sends the person to jail.

Players may buy individual properties as they land on the unowned spaces. The player buys each property from the bank at the price printed on the board and receives a title deed. If the player chooses not to buy the property, the banker auctions the title deed to the highest bidder.

Certain spaces are marked Chance or Community Chest. When players land on one of these spaces, they take the top card from the Chance deck or the Community Chest deck, follow the instructions on the card, and return it to the bottom of the deck. Both decks include a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, which may be used as needed or sold to another player. Other cards, however, advance the player to a particular space or may require the payment of various sums of money.

When players land on property owned by others, they must pay the rent indicated on the owner’s title deed. Rents vary from property to property and are doubled if a player owns all the properties in a group, thus having a monopoly. After acquiring a monopoly, the owner can collect increasingly higher rents by adding houses and eventually a single hotel to each property. The rentals for houses and hotels appear on the title deed.

No set rules govern the trading of property as long as a transaction does not involve houses or hotels. Players may sell railroads, utilities, and undeveloped properties in any way they choose, getting as much in return as they can.

Property may be mortgaged through the bank at any time for the sum shown on the back of the title deed. However, any houses or hotels on the property must first be sold back to the bank at half their purchase price. Players may lift mortgages on their properties by paying the bank the amount of the mortgage plus ten percent interest.

The game ends when all the players except one have gone bankrupt. This happens when they owe more money than they can pay, either to the bank or to other players. The last player remaining in the game is the winner.

Monopoly® was invented in 1930, during the Great Depression, by Charles Darrow, a former salesman who was unable to find work. Working on his kitchen table in Germantown, Pa., Darrow sketched out some street names of his family’s favorite seaside resort spot, Atlantic City, N.J. Then he added the names of railroads that served Atlantic City and carved tiny wooden houses and hotels. After playing the game with his friends, Darrow began selling it to various department stores in Philadelphia. Parker Brothers, a firm that manufactures and sells a variety of game products, bought the rights to Monopoly® in 1933, and by 1935 the game had become a best-seller in the United States.

Monopoly® is manufactured in many different languages and is sold in many countries around the world. Different versions of the game vary in the names used for properties and in the various national currencies supplied. In the United States, for example, players try to buy such high-rent properties as Boardwalk and Park Place and they collect $200 for passing GO. In Great Britain they compete for Mayfair and Piccadilly and collect £200 after passing GO.

Scrabble® Crossword Game

Scrabble® is a word game, and the players put letter tiles on a board to form words that interlock, much as in a crossword puzzle. They place their letters on individual squares to take maximum advantage of the numerical value of each letter, plus the premium values of some of the board’s 225 squares.

The premium squares on the board are colored pink, red, light blue, and dark blue. The pink squares double the value of a word that lies across one of them, and the red squares triple the value of the word. The light blue squares double the value of the letter on them, and the dark blue squares triple the individual letter’s value. The center square, which is pink and marked with a star, is a double-word-value square. It is a main rule of the game that the first player at the start of the game must use this square.

Each letter tile has a letter printed on it, plus a point value ranging from one to ten. There are more tiles for the most frequently used letters than for the remainder of the alphabet. For example, there are 12 E tiles, but only one each for Q, X, and Z. The most infrequently used letters, of course, have the highest values. There are also two blank tiles, which may be used for any letter the player wishes. These tiles have no individual point value.

At the start of a game, each player picks seven tiles from the set of 100, which are lying face down, and arranges the seven on individual racks. The first player must use two or more letters to form a word. Players may not use proper nouns, slang, abbreviations, contractions, hyphenated words, or foreign words. After a word has been formed, the player draws as many tiles from the central pool as were used, thus maintaining a supply of seven tiles.

Succeeding players must use at least one letter from an existing word as part of their new words. They may lengthen an existing word or run a new word across or immediately above or below and parallel to it. Any letters touching other letters must be part of complete words. A bonus of 50 points is awarded for using all seven tiles in one move.

Players may choose not to place any tiles on the board in a move but to replace some or all from the pool. They receive no score for doing this. The game ends when the last tile has been played or when no player can play a remaining tile. Remaining tiles are subtracted from a player’s total score, and the player with the highest score wins.

Other Board Games

A number of other board games have been popular for many years. They include Candyland and the British Snakes & Ladders, both of which are children’s racing games. The British game Halma and its American variation, Chinese Checkers, are other racing games. Trivial Pursuit is a game that requires knowledge of many little-known facts on diverse subjects. Diplomacy, an American game, is a contest of negotiation. Among the popular war games are Decline & Fall, from Canada; Tri-Tactics, which is British; and Confrontation, a British game based on the threat of nuclear war. From the 1950s onward, the ancient and complex Chinese game of go gained a following in the United States.

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